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Redirections, tdssservers.dat and others

This post may be a little short on technical detail, but I am hoping it will help those of you pulling your hair out over this one. HiJackThis didn't find it, neither did SpyBot.

I went nuts with this when my daughter came home from school with an infected laptop. Symptoms included a runaway iexplore.exe running in the background that would eventually chew up available memory and freeze the computer. While shooting that problem, I found the redirection issue.

After rebooting and finishing with SDFix (log posted below) McAfee detected the trojan and repaired (removed) the offending files, identifying them as DNSChanger.gen (Trojan) and Generic FakeAlert.a (Trojan). The computer is now exorcised.

BC AdBot (Login to Remove)

Hi CoachBill and welcome to BleepingComputer. The infection you have is a very nasty rootkit.

IMPORTANT NOTE: One or more of the identified infections was related to a rootkit component. Rootkits and backdoor Trojan are very dangerous because they use advanced techniques (backdoors) as a means of accessing a computer system that bypasses security mechanisms and steal sensitive information which they send back to the hacker. Many rootkits can hook into the Windows 32-bit kernel, and patch several APIs to hide new registry keys and files they install. Remote attackers use backdoor Trojans and rootkits as part of an exploit to gain unauthorized access to a computer and take control of it without your knowledge.

If your computer was used for online banking, has credit card information or other sensitive data on it, all passwords should be changed immediately to include those used for banking, email, eBay, paypal and online forums. You should consider them to be compromised. They should be changed by using a different computer and not the infected one. If not, an attacker may get the new passwords and transaction information. Banking and credit card institutions should be notified of the possible security breach. Because your computer was compromised please read How Do I Handle Possible Identify Theft, Internet Fraud and CC Fraud?

Although the rootkit was identified and removed, your PC has likely been compromised and there is no way to be sure the computer can ever be trusted again. It is dangerous and incorrect to assume that because the rootkit has been removed the computer is now secure. In some instances an infection may have caused so much damage to your system that it cannot be completely cleaned or repaired. The malware may leave so many remnants behind that security tools cannot find them. Many experts in the security community believe that once infected with this type of malware, the best course of action is to wipe the drive clean, reformat and reinstall the OS. Please read: